America Since 1980: A Right Turn Leading to a Dead End

U.S. politics took a sharp turn to the right in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Domestically, Reagan touted an agenda that would lead to a sharp upward redistribution of income. Internationally, Reagan explicitly rejected the "détente" framework for engaging the Soviet Union that had been accepted by the leadership of both major parties since the beginning of the Cold War. In its place, Reagan put forward a doctrine of U.S. unilateralism in which the United States basically claimed the right to do whatever it wanted, unconstrained by allies or international institutions.

And we wonder why things are the way they are today.

In fact, the ability of the United States to impose its will on much of the world has been sharply constrained by the fact that it is now a huge debtor nation that is borrowing $800 billion a year and that it has most of its military bogged down in the Iraq War.

This is a bad situation for a bully to be in.

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This is a bad situation for a bully to be in. After a quarter century of not caring about the concerns of other countries, the United States is facing a situation where other countries may not care much about our plight. We may soon wish that we had spent more effort building up meaningful international institutions when we had the opportunity.

Unfortunately, American leaders have been too short sighted and too wrapped up in their own agendas to give this issue much thought.

And the country will pay for it.

There is more here.